2023 Grand National

[AvfcRigo82]

15 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

I don’t really have a strong opinion either way 

On the fence then. Fair enough.

[blandy]

12 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

I doubt horseracing would be banned worldwide overnight. 
 

Even if it did, those horses could still have a life afterwards. 
 

And even if they didn’t, there would be a strong argument that it would be for the greater good. 
If you couldn’t ensure the safety of the horses that currently exist for the sole purpose of horse racing but knew that the end result would be an end to horses being bred purely for racing then it would be a risk worth taking. 

There’s a thing about cow-kind. It’s this: the cow community is huge, cows everywhere. Cows prospering because humanses feed them and house them and farm them for their eggs and feathers and stuff. But if we stopped doing that, because y’know, cowing is bad, then cow kind would fade and diminish, and the cow empire and species would be much smaller in size. So my a science point is that similarly, horsing benefits horse-kind. There is more horses alive and more cowses alive because we like watching them run about a bit, or we like eating their eggs and wings. I’m not totally certain of the details, but I think the philosophical point stands.

[Talldarkandransome]

9 minutes ago, blandy said:

There’s a thing about cow-kind. It’s this: the cow community is huge, cows everywhere. Cows prospering because humanses feed them and house them and farm them for their eggs and feathers and stuff. But if we stopped doing that, because y’know, cowing is bad, then cow kind would fade and diminish, and the cow empire and species would be much smaller in size. So my a science point is that similarly, horsing benefits horse-kind. There is more horses alive and more cowses alive because we like watching them run about a bit, or we like eating their eggs and wings. I’m not totally certain of the details, but I think the philosophical point stands.

I eat meat and this made me chuckle like a dead mushroom being turned into a chicken leg 

[Wainy316]

Now that there's no money to be made from matched betting anymore, ban it.

[Stevo985]

11 hours ago, blandy said:

There’s a thing about cow-kind. It’s this: the cow community is huge, cows everywhere. Cows prospering because humanses feed them and house them and farm them for their eggs and feathers and stuff. But if we stopped doing that, because y’know, cowing is bad, then cow kind would fade and diminish, and the cow empire and species would be much smaller in size. So my a science point is that similarly, horsing benefits horse-kind. There is more horses alive and more cowses alive because we like watching them run about a bit, or we like eating their eggs and wings. I’m not totally certain of the details, but I think the philosophical point stands.

Breeding things because we like them and then treating them with insane cruelty is not a good thing no matter how you frame it 

[blandy]

16 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

Breeding things because we like them and then treating them with insane cruelty is not a good thing no matter how you frame it 

Indeed. I think the philosophical argument is quite interesting though. Keeping to horsing, while there may be an occasional bad egg (I don't know enough to be sure), it seems that the vast vast majority of thoroughbred horses are far from treated with insane cruelty, far from it. They lead pretty excellent lives. The unfortunate part is that (on average) there's 0.4% of them that end up dying as a direct consequence of taking part in horsing races. For the national, it's 1.2% which needs improving on, and there are things that can be done to help with that - fewer horses racing at the same time, better action where a horse sheds its jockey, to seperate and calm down those horses. More care in the event of race or start disruption, rather than sticking to the scheduled timetable as closely as possible, because TV, and so on. Perhaps reducing the number of  fences, and/or the length of the race...

[AvfcRigo82]

23 minutes ago, blandy said:

it seems that the vast vast majority of thoroughbred horses are far from treated with insane cruelty, far from it. They lead pretty excellent lives.

You're absolutely right.

The care and attention they get is incredible. The welfare, exercise facilities and medical treatment they receive is the best you can get.

Insane cruelty, not a chance.

 

[Rds1983]

Do horse race their entire lives or is it more like greyhound racing where they retire around 2 or 3 years old?

[tomav84]

14 minutes ago, Rds1983 said:

Do horse race their entire lives or is it more like greyhound racing where they retire around 2 or 3 years old?

no...only about half of it. they don't tend to race past 12/13 years old, often less than that

[Rds1983]

Just now, tomav84 said:

no...only about half of it. they don't tend to race past 12/13 years old, often less than that

What happens to them after they retire, do their owners keep them? Assuming only the successful ones go into breeding? Greyhounds would hope to be adopted but guessing that's not so easy with horses. 

[tomav84]

4 minutes ago, Rds1983 said:

What happens to them after they retire, do their owners keep them? Assuming only the successful ones go into breeding? Greyhounds would hope to be adopted but guessing that's not so easy with horses. 

yep they're either adopted, kept for breeding, some go in to things like dressage/polo. there are various charities that help with rehoming, same as greyhounds

[AvfcRigo82]

33 minutes ago, Rds1983 said:

Do horse race their entire lives or is it more like greyhound racing where they retire around 2 or 3 years old?

As @tomav84 states, successful horses spend half of their lives racing.

16 minutes ago, tomav84 said:

no...only about half of it. they don't tend to race past 12/13 years old, often less than that

However, it differs between Flat race horses and Jump race horses.

The age and type of race a thoroughbred is eligible to race in is dependent on a number of things.

A horse bred to race on the flat may not race until the start of the flat season in the year of its second birthday, (all horses in the northern hemisphere all go up in age by a year every January 1st - regardless what time/month of the year they're born) 

They generally see their peak between 4-7yrs old - some can race up to the age of 10.

Whereas horses who are bred to race over jumps can’t race, at the earliest until 1st May in the year of its third birthday.

There's certain age restrictions on the type of jumps race a horse is eligible to start in therefore many horses will be older than 3yrs old when they race for the first time and can go on to have a career racing until about 12/13yrs old.

Jumps horses retire at different rates though. Not many are left racing at 12 or 13, yet at 10yrs old as they're at their best in some of the top races at Cheltenham and Aintree etc.

 

Edited April 20, 2023 by AvfcRigo82
.

[tomav84]

15 minutes ago, AvfcRigo82 said:

A horse bred to race on the flat may not race until the start of the flat season in the year of its second birthday, (all horses in the northern hemisphere all go up in age by a year every January 1st - regardless what time/month of the year they're born)

well i never knew this. i assumed horse age was just related to DoB. in hindsight, this way is much easier

[chrisp65]

In January 2022 UK law was changed to stop ex race horses entering the food chain.

 

[bickster]

24 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

In January 2022 UK law was changed to stop ex race horses entering the food chain.

 

Dogs have rights too, what were they thinking?

[chrisp65]

1 hour ago, bickster said:

Dogs have rights too, what were they thinking?

On a bit of further reading, it’s only uK based race horses that can’t be slaughtered for the food industry.

Of the 4,000 thoroughbred racehorses sent to UK abatoirres between 2019 and 2022, 90% appear to have been imported from Ireland. The wording of the legislation doesn’t cover these.

Phew!

[Rds1983]

1 hour ago, chrisp65 said:

On a bit of further reading, it’s only uK based race horses that can’t be slaughtered for the food industry.

Of the 4,000 thoroughbred racehorses sent to UK abatoirres between 2019 and 2022, 90% appear to have been imported from Ireland. The wording of the legislation doesn’t cover these.

Phew!

Yay. Cheap lasagna!

[Xela]

8 hours ago, AvfcRigo82 said:

As @tomav84 states, successful horses spend half of their lives racing.

However, it differs between Flat race horses and Jump race horses.

The age and type of race a thoroughbred is eligible to race in is dependent on a number of things.

A horse bred to race on the flat may not race until the start of the flat season in the year of its second birthday, (all horses in the northern hemisphere all go up in age by a year every January 1st - regardless what time/month of the year they're born) 

They generally see their peak between 4-7yrs old - some can race up to the age of 10.

Whereas horses who are bred to race over jumps can’t race, at the earliest until 1st May in the year of its third birthday.

There's certain age restrictions on the type of jumps race a horse is eligible to start in therefore many horses will be older than 3yrs old when they race for the first time and can go on to have a career racing until about 12/13yrs old.

Jumps horses retire at different rates though. Not many are left racing at 12 or 13, yet at 10yrs old as they're at their best in some of the top races at Cheltenham and Aintree etc.

 

Been a while since I was into my nags, but Flat horses are at their peak between 3 and 4 and very few push on longer than that, especially the stallions as the stud fees dwarf their prize fees, especially if they have been successful. 

Jump horses run much older as you say as they have no stud value, due to being gelded. This makes them easier to control as well. 

 

[Stevo985]

10 hours ago, blandy said:

Indeed. I think the philosophical argument is quite interesting though. Keeping to horsing, while there may be an occasional bad egg (I don't know enough to be sure), it seems that the vast vast majority of thoroughbred horses are far from treated with insane cruelty, far from it. They lead pretty excellent lives. The unfortunate part is that (on average) there's 0.4% of them that end up dying as a direct consequence of taking part in horsing races. For the national, it's 1.2% which needs improving on, and there are things that can be done to help with that - fewer horses racing at the same time, better action where a horse sheds its jockey, to seperate and calm down those horses. More care in the event of race or start disruption, rather than sticking to the scheduled timetable as closely as possible, because TV, and so on. Perhaps reducing the number of  fences, and/or the length of the race...

Yeah my point was more against the argument that if it wasn’t for racing or, for the wider point on other animals, the food industry then these animals wouldn’t exist. 
 

It’s a ridiculous argument, and even if it’s true, it doesn’t justify cruelty 

[robby b]

Sorry for this post below being so long but I'm still trying to get my head around last week's protest, which has been troubling me literally every day since.

I'm against horse racing. I can believe that some horses, maybe a lot of horses, love to run fast, fair enough. I do too. It's fun. But for those that really love to run fast and maybe to race, they could just run fast and race another horse or two in fields by themselves. They don't need a person on their back in order to run fast. (Quite a lot of times I have seen a horse or a few horses galloping through fields without any rider on their back and I'm guessing this is likely to be sometimes simply out of enjoyment). Without humans, without whips, without being made to jump over fences that are scarily, dangerously high and not in a tightly packed large group of 30 or so.

However, in the evening after the Grand National I watched an interview of one of the horse owners condemning the protestors because of some of the horses becoming agitated due to the delay. This reminded me of a few Grand National restarts I saw on TV when I was a kid and I think he must be right about this. So then this means that what the protestors did was at least quite reckless, perhaps seriously misjudged and in a way counter-productive. I suppose that the group's leaders are especially at fault (for any extra agitation among the horses that the delay caused).

In their defence the protestors may argue that because the race had got delayed the organisers should have called it off for that day. But that seems to me to be very wishful thinking. I mean, what was the likelihood of that happening realistically?

I imagine the protestors' hope was to get the race cancelled that day. But... surely they must have considered that it might end up just being delayed to later in the afternoon and perhaps just by 20 minutes or so, which is what happened. I think at least some of them must have considered the fact that some horses get agitated (or even more agitated) the longer they have to wait at or near the starting point, putting their lives at greater risk.

So I don't think those protestors should have taken that risk that they took. It seems to me misguided possibly and even hypocritical perhaps. They could have carried out some  protest at the racecourse several hours before the race or the evening before or even at the end of the race, rather than just minutes before the start.

However, I still don't believe that more than a minority of them don't actually care about horses' lives. Would more than a minority of them really carry out those acts (trespassing and then installing themselves on the racecourse or glueing their hands to a motorway) just to impress their fellow protestor mates and other mates? Personally I'd have to really genuinely care about a cause to do either of those things !

So my guess is that some of them lack logical, sound judgement. Perhaps they let their very strong emotions take over too much, clouding their reasoning. I feel that just hoping that no horse would die or get injured if the race went ahead a little delayed isn't good enough.

I wonder if some of them decided that following a very visible protest (on TV and photographed by journalists) if the race went ahead that afternoon and a horse got killed its death wouldn't be in vain and could hopefully help to save other horses' lives in future... But I'm not really convinced, I still feel that wasn't fair on that horse that did die or the one that needed an operation afterwards (at least one). The protestors might argue that the same horse which died may have died anyway if there hadn't been any protest. But then again it might not have. It's impossible to know that.